18 ms·

Energy

• iamcurious 11y ago
  I find it strange there is no mention about batteries. From what I understand (and it isn't much, I'm way out of my field) getting energy is easy, saving it is hard.
  • mbca 11y ago
    Indeed. The essay mentions "predictability" as a problem with solar, but that becomes moot with good enough storage & transmission.
    • cjbenedikt 11y ago
      Precisely! The issue is storage. There are many ways to create energy: solar, wind, water, nuclear (thorium!)...but storage is still unsolved. And Lithium is NOT the answer, not at the scale we need.
      • transfire 11y ago
        The storage problem is almost solved. Batteries/Supercaps with double the capacity, charge rate and lifespan of current Lithium-ions should be on the market soon.
        • msandford 11y ago
          That doesn't even close to solve the problem! Lithium-ion batteries are still at least $100/kWh (probably more like $300/kWh) and assuming a useful life of 1000 charge/discharge cycles, you're talking between $0.10 and $0.30/kWh just for the STORAGE! That doesn't even take into account the cost of generating the energy to begin with, nor the losses that come with charging and discharging the battery, nor the capital cost on the inverter that absolutely isn't free and definitely doesn't last forever. Until storage can be had for a few cents per kWh storage is an unsolved problem. I suspect that it will continue to be an unsolved problem for quite some time. Not because it's impossibly hard, but because getting oil or gas or coal out of the ground is so easy and has such large energy gain (output energy / input energy) that you have to be very clever to beat it.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    If you can generate on demand then you don't need batteries.
    • nine_k 11y ago
      Batteries are great when you need a relatively compact and lightweight source without moving parts and noise. That is, cars, helicopter drones, phones, etc. Batteries still lack the high energy density of fuels like kerosene; you cannot fly a jet plane or rocket on batteries. Electric power can probably be used to synthesize traditional fuels from carbon dioxide and water, to stay carbon-neutral. Plants can do that but in a quite inefficient manner. A (bio)chemistry breakthrough is badly wanted on this front.
  • cjensen 11y ago
    Fusion and Fission systems tend to run 24/7, unlike Wind and Solar. There is far less need to store energy when using the former types of generation.
    • jarvist 11y ago
      Fission: Nuclear power stations have relatively low capacity factors (a measurement of how much of time they're actually connected to the grid and producing power). This is typically 70% over the last few decades for Western countries (i.e. a third of the time, a nuclear power station is not producing anything). As well as unintended maintenance shut down periods, most reactor designs require a multi-month shut down to refuel. In recent years some countries have managed closer to 90%. Fusion: By '24/7' you mean the 0.5 s sustained burn at JET in the 90s. Humanity has not yet managed to sustain fusion for a full second on the Earth, let alone get any useful power out of it. ITER (the next generation Tokamak test reactor) isn't built yet. The intent is for it to achieve 1000 s of fusion burn time. Its over budget and behind time, and they've just had a management reshuffle to try and deal with this. * Edited & extended to try and incorporate nbouscal's feedback from below
      • nbouscal 11y ago
        I think you would like to know that your comment is completely impenetrable to an average intelligent layperson. All the words are reasonably understandable, but I have no idea how they translate into a response to the parent comment. My guess is that you're falling prey to the illusion of transparency [1], though I suppose it's possible that you were only intending your comment to be meaningful to people familiar with the industry jargon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_transparency Edit: +1, much clearer what you mean now.
      • DennisP 11y ago
        Do you mean to include the entire U.S. as one of those states? Wikipedia lists nuclear's capacity factor as 90.3% in the U.S. in 2009, and 88.7% averaged over 2006-2012, according to the DOE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States The Helion design which Ycombinator funds is pulsed, so sustained burn time isn't applicable. It's also much smaller and cheaper than mainstream tokamaks.
  • nine_k 11y ago
    You can either collect and store energy where it's abundant but intermittent (solar, wind), or generate it reasonably close to the consumers. The problem is that the sources like solar have both power density and availability problems in higher latitudes, and power density required to e.g. power a major factory may be a problem even in a sunny place. I'm also not sure about price per kW of installed generating power; it looks like solar power is still way behind atomic power in this regard. In general, everyone would love breakthroughs both in electricity generation, transmission, and accumulation. Looking at the amounts of coal still mined for burning, generation should not be overlooked.
• jonathannorris 11y ago
  It's great to see you invest your time and money in nuclear power Sam. We already have the nuclear technology to solve our energy emissions problem, we just lack the political will to make the shift away from coal/oil/gas. Great leaps in the efficiency and safety of nuclear power systems will hopefully make the shift politically achievable.
  • arenaninja 11y ago
    I thought the biggest hurdle with nuclear energy was waste management? As in, we've nowhere to put the toxic dump that's produced that will radiate a few tens of thousands of years? Unless that's been solved, in which case consumer education would be a next step
    • jerf 11y ago
      I've been convinced for a while that the reason this problem is not solved is that everybody is sure that the problem is not solved, and therefore nuclear is really hard, and therefore we shouldn't do research on nuclear, and therefore we shouldn't do any engineering on the topic of how to solve our waste issues. In other words, ultimately the reason is circular logic. It's 2015, and we remain essentially stuck on 1950s B-Movie era stereotypes on how nuclear works, what it is, and how dangerous it is.
    • mikeash 11y ago
      Much of the waste problem can be solved by using reactors designed to use the waste as fuel. This isn't currently done, but there's no big technical reason it couldn't be. For what remains after that, well, there's nothing particularly wrong with sticking it in some extremely sturdy armored containers, sticking the containers in a shed, surrounding the shed with a razor-wire fence, and stationing a couple of guards at the gate. The paranoia over nuclear waste is weird. What if civilization collapses and people in the far future discover the stuff and don't know it's dangerous? It lasts tens of thousands of years, after all! OK, but we leave dangerous stuff all over the place. There are tons of barrels of toxic chemicals, ponds full of poison, and heaps of awful stuff just sitting around, and more being produced all the time. Nuclear waste is bad because it lasts tens of thousands of years? How about arsenic or mercury, which lasts forever? And sure, precautions are taken with those toxins, but not on the "this must be placed in a geologically stable area, packaged to survive the fall of civilization, and signposted so that all future intelligence will know to avoid it" level of precaution.
• codingdave 11y ago
  I worked on renewable energy projects a few years back, and while the idea of a large disruptive technology development sounds awesome, the reality is that there are already a plethora of renewable energy turbines and designs that would greatly improve the world... But the engineers and inventors running around with these ideas have no idea how to go from a small scale proof of concept into a fully built out manufacturing and implementation process. Even if they do figure out how to get engineering and manufacturing in place, then there are regulatory barriers to figure out. There will be politics involved, and legal challenges. And of course, you need to actually operate the sites on an ongoing basis. All of these challenges can be overcome... but most people who know how to do so already work in the energy industry. What is really needed is a group of people who can bridge those gaps to take an innovate design from an engineers drawing board, and jump through all the hoops to make it a live production site. If such a group were to be built, real change could happen very quickly.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    There is also a very large amount of snake oil in the renewable energy field and a ton of ideas that keep being recycled that have long ago been invalidated.
    • codingdave 11y ago
      There is some of that. There are also very valid projects out there. I am running under the assumption that people can tell the difference. Frankly, most of the sketchy folk that I ran into during my projects were the investors, not the engineers.
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        > Frankly, most of the sketchy folk that I ran into during my projects were the investors, not the engineers. I've seen a couple of both, but for the most part the engineers when they are wrong are deluding themselves as well, the investors that are sketchy seem to be more cynical and aware of what they are doing.
  • 11y ago
• jsprogrammer 11y ago
  Hmm, major reversals of conflict-of-interest policy? (ie. now chairman of two YC companies and personally investing in them) Large claims with no hard data comparisons? (eg. atomic power has major cost, density, and predictability advantages) This(?): >There will only be one cheapest source of energy Really? There can't be two sources at or near equilibrium? These systems are not deployed in isolated, designer environments, but instead are deployed in complex environments. Transportation and project logistics will prefer some sources over others. The lack of any real metric for cost or "cheapness" is a red flag. Is cost being measured in nominal dollars? Will such a thing even exist in the 22nd century?
  • benaiah 11y ago
    The hard data has been around for years, and is fairly easy to find. Not every blog post needs to have an accompanying statistical analysis.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      So easy to find that it can't even be linked to on the web by two people that claim it exists?
      • mikeyouse 11y ago
        I still think there are huge issues with nuclear that need to be solved but nothing Sam said was controversial; Cost: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm -- on an LCOE basis, Advanced Nuclear is cheaper than everything but natural gas and that's entirely due to CapEx costs to build new plants -- which are what the modular nuclear companies that Sam's joining are working on fixing. Density: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie... Predictability: Can be assessed by the capacity factor of plants that are running, the EIA publishes monthly data; http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=14611 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=14611
• sgk284 11y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but going to UPower's site shows nothing but a somewhat sparse wintery forest. Perhaps I've too much sci-fi on the brain, but it made me think of a nuclear winter.
  • donttrustatoms 11y ago
    Haha, wow. :) Thanks for the comment. It was meant to signify the communities in the far north or arctic that currently are reliant on very expensive and dirty diesel... Our webpage is under construction probably to be put up in about a week. You can definitely feel free to ask any questions and would appreciate your thoughts on the new one.
    • kpennell 11y ago
      cool of you to respond!
• api 11y ago
  I'm very happy to see independent fusion efforts raising money, given that government R&D has decided to put nearly all its eggs in the tokamak basket.
• washedup 11y ago
  A huge part of the problem is not investment or technology, but the legislative structure which still favors fossil fuels. The lobbying interests and influence are immense. Once this starts to change there will be a rapid shift towards clean energy.
• Eleutheria 11y ago
  Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home. Individual energy independence, even if it will never be possible, that's where our dreams should be. Then water, then food. That's disruption at seismic level. Post-scarcity world.
  • beat 11y ago
    Decentralization solves a lot of other problems as well - it's less vulnerable to accidental or intentional failure, it requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc. Solar has the advantage that it cannot be weaponized even in nonsense theory, greatly relaxing export regulation. This makes it a viable solution for developing countries and remote areas, not just the handful of nations with the wealth and sophistication to manage a reactor.
    • thesteamboat 11y ago
      > Decentralization [...] requires much less skill and expense to implement and operate, etc. This isn't true because decentralization is easier, it's true because technologies which this isn't true of (require large capital expenditures or high degrees of expertise) can't be given to everyone and their mother. By saying we're doing decentralized X we're moving the problem of requisite operating skill to the designers who must make their systems simple enough for laypeople. Likewise factories and engineers must find economies of scale in production of units which are distinct from the efficiencies we currently realize building relative few, much larger generators. In short, while decentralization solves some of these problems, it also presupposes the solution of others. It may be a worthy goal, but there are challenges to get there.
      • Thiz 11y ago
        I believe the most important unobserved benefit from decentralized solutions is the wave of innovation it would spark. Private moneys would compete for a slice of the pie bringing to market millions of ideas putting the pedal of progress to the metal.
• sskates 11y ago
  I always wondered why more energy wasn't generated from nuclear. On paper it seems like a great energy source. Kudos to Sam for putting not just his money, but his time where his mouth is. If only the rest of the internet could do the same!
  • JshWright 11y ago
    > If only the rest of the internet could do the same! Sam is in a fairly unique position to be able to do that...
  • chinathrow 11y ago
    > On paper it seems like a great energy source. On paper the waste issue is still not solved. And the risks are still large (yes I know, coal, gas and oil has it's drawbacks too).
    • sskates 11y ago
      Not sure about waste, can someone else here speak to that? Also deaths per unit energy are incredibly low relative to other sources.
      • atomatica 11y ago
        http://www.transatomicpower.com http://www.transatomicpower.com
      • jddw 11y ago
        The UPower design is waste negative so it can convert the entire planet's spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium stockpiles into enough energy to power the globe for about 500 years. All while leaving behind a waste stream that decays to be less radioactive than the ground beneath your feet in a few hundred years. If we buried it in Paul Revere's basement when it was built, people could see it and touch it today without any exposure above background. Not to mention it is also fuel agnostic so it can run on thorium as well. It's also important to highlight that the UPower design can consume the entire actinide vector because it uses fast neutrons. A lot of the longer lived actinides cannot be fissioned or transmuted effectively by thermal neutrons so they just build up. We like to say we are the ultimate disposal, and can take anything, including the waste from other waste consumers.
• beat 11y ago
  I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up. Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement. With those incredible advantages, it doesn't need to be cheaper than nuclear - it just needs to be adequately cheap.
  • DennisP 11y ago
    Gigawatt-scale nuclear reactors take a long time. Ycombinator is investing in factory-produced reactors that fit in a truck. There are quite a few other companies working on small factory-produced reactors. Solar with batteries is a lot more expensive than solar alone. Solar is doing well right now with natural gas backup, but a lot of us would like to avoid fossil entirely. Solar with nuclear backup might be a great combination, assuming demand correlates reasonably well with daylight hours.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Confused: if you have nuclear, skip the solar and save money?
      • DennisP 11y ago
        Sure, if nuclear ends up cheaper per kWh than solar without backup.
      • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
        Depends if nuclear includes decommissioning and clean-up costs. Do you really want lakes full of residual waste for the next few tens of millennia? The UK currently has no idea what to do with a lot of its waste. So it's simply left to rust and ferment in water - not a good outcome. Sustainable intermittency turns out to be something of a myth anyway. Intermittency effects across Europe turn out to be negligible. So instead of building nukes, you can spend the money on mixed-mode sustainables and a hugely improved distribution grid and get a cleaner and more reliable outcome overall. You can also make sustainables distributed, and run them on a domestic scale as well as an industrial one. PV roof installations have worked well in Germany and are starting to work well in the UK, even though neither location is known for being sunny. You'd get much better results in the sunnier parts of the US.
• transfire 11y ago
  There are other technologies. Nuclear isomers for example have a lot of potential, but the fossil fuel hegemony really keeps alternatives from flourishing. We can be very thankful that photovoltaics was invented pre-WII, otherwise I doubt we'd be seeing it today either.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    That's not really how it works. Technologies are either commercially viable or they are not. The thing that enabled windpower and solar power to take off is economic parity with other means of generating power. Photovoltaics and windpower being 'invented' (as if it isn't blatantly obvious that there is energy in wind and solar and that this energy can be captured in a myriad of ways) before a certain date has nothing to do with whether or not we see them today. Tons of money and effort has been sunk in attempts to create more sources for energy and some of those have paid off and others are still under review. The 'fossil fuel hegemony' is actually quite a large investor in more than a few projects, their product is energy, not a particular kind of energy.
  • jarvist 11y ago
    The first practical high efficiency (6%) cell was made in Bell Laboratories in 1954. It was the first PN junction silicon solar cell, the technology that still powers 90% of solar cell modules on the market. http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200904/physicshistory.cfm http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200904/physicshistor...
  • selimthegrim 11y ago
    Who on earth told you that? Hafnium doesn't work - DOE and DOD moved mountains in the nineties trying to get it to work and a number of people lost their careers and sanity in the process. But you go ahead and tell yourself that it's the "fossil-fuel hegemony" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy (I'm sure you think muon-catalyzed fusion is right around the corner too)
• andy_ppp 11y ago
  Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years. The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years).[39] Nuclear waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.[40] Governments around the world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management solutions.[41] Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_of_waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Management_o...
  • transfire 11y ago
    http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...
    • jddw 11y ago
      This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.
  • chinathrow 11y ago
    Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days. Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990 Destruction started: 1995 Ongoing as of today....
    • 11y ago
• falsestprophet 11y ago
  The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion). It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.
  • GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    How is this anything but useless pedantry?
    • drcube 11y ago
      I think the OP is illustrating the pedantry of "well technically solar energy is atomic energy" by pointing out that, by that standard, so is coal and oil. In other words, I don't think you disagree with the OP.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • crystaln 11y ago
    Perhaps we should call it all Big Bang energy. I agree this is silly. Harnessing the radiant energy of the sun is categorically different from converting wind or carbon into usable energy. Trying to group these into one category seems out of touch with the reality of developing the t technlogies.
  • vectorjohn 11y ago
    You could get super pedantic and say it's all gravity based energy, but it stops being a useful way to classify things long before that. Distinguishing between carbon and atomic is a pretty useful and meaningful distinction, although ultimately not perfectly correct.
  • DannoHung 11y ago
    There's certainly a lot less latency from atomic reaction to harvested energy though :D
• hyperpallium 11y ago
  I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have. In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc. Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up as heat anyway. (Of course it's far better for the environment than present coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy initially came from the sun anyway, but it will still have some environmental impact.)
  • yellowapple 11y ago
    My impression was that the vast majority of sunlight Earth receives is wasted, and that solar panels just gobble up the waste (so long as they're built in, say, deserts or other places where they're not blocking out a whole lot of flora/fauna). Wind and hydroelectric, on the other hand, could very well have significant environmental impacts if deployed on a sufficiently-large scale, despite being technically "clean" energy (aside from the non-clean energy and materials used in their construction).
  • secstate 11y ago
    These are the sorts of deep questions that often go unasked as we humans look for ever greater efficiencies. I had to attend a seminar on geothermal wells presented by a group of ageing hippies. When I asked if any long term studies had been done on the affect of mass-geothermal well drilling and pumping cool water out of the ground and cycling warmer water back in, no one could even parse my question properly.
  • Retric 11y ago
    As a sanity check, the earth gets ~1366 W/m2 * (6,371 km) ^2 * pi = 1.7e17 watts * 24h/day * 365.2425day/year ~= 1.5e21Wh/year ~= 1,500,000,000 terawatt hours/year. Humans use 155,505 terawatt-hour / year or ~ 1/10,000th of that much energy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption) Further, it's all (99.99%) going to get released so net impact is going to be very local. PS: In the end the real change would simply be changing the albino of the planet slightly. But, buildings and roads already cover far more land than solar is expected to anytime soon with minimal impact.
• erobbins 11y ago
  This is fantastic. Nuclear fission suffers from a hindenberg-type PR problem, where incidents from early design mistakes and poor choices color the opinions of people even though modern reactor designs are safe, efficient, and essentially clean other than small amounts of waste. I would love to work on a project like this.
  • beat 11y ago
    It's not just a PR problem, though. It's a cost structure problem, and a grid problem. On the cost front, they're tremendously expensive. New tech and manufacturing processes might get the cost from the billions to the millions, but it's still very expensive. On the grid front, nuclear is good for baseline, but not peak load. Most nuclear reactors can't just be flipped on and off with a switch, or even scale power quickly... they're more or less constant. So you still need a peak load system, which currently consists of gas plants - very expensive, since they're intermittent and offline most of the time.
• hackuser 11y ago
  Years ago, the story I understood was that renewables couldn't scale up fast enough to sufficiently mitigate climate change, and nuclear was the only answer. Recently, I've read that renewables have scaled up much faster than expected. Does anyone know the current story? Can renewables scale up fast enough? Also, does the availability problem (i.e., renewables not being available when the sun/wind are not) prevent them from having a sufficient impact? I could imagine that, even if renewables weren't always available, their use still could reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate climate change sufficiently.
  • DennisP 11y ago
    Renewables still aren't fast enough by themselves, even with the most optimistic projections, according to engineers from Google's big renewables project: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-rea... Availability is a problem. Right now we're mainly backing up renewables with fossil plants. Most people really aren't getting what climate scientists are saying these days, which is that we have to cut emissions drastically in the very near future to avoid disaster. If we exceed +2C, or possibly even +1.5C, positive feedbacks will take the planet several degrees further even with no more emissions from us. Right now we're at +0.8C. Every ton of CO2 we emit takes 30 years to have its full effect on the temperature, considering direct effects alone, so we've got another 30 years of warming locked in already. +4C or so might not sound like much but judging by geological history, the effects would include an enormous reduction in the amount of food we're able to produce.
  • donttrustatoms 11y ago
    Solar photovoltaic has dropped in cost significantly which is awesome for many applications. The problem for an individual or the grid for renewable intermittents is the consistency: the true cost is the cost not just of generation but generation plus storage (or backup). Batteries have not had the step change in cost vs deliverable, and the question of effective and not carbon intensive recycling of batteries and most e waste remains. If solar is x cents a kWh, must add cost of storage or fossil backup generation to make sense in both terms of cost as well as carbon. For instance, the expected cost per kWh of the Powerwall is about 35c/kWh which must be added to cost of generation and the maximum amount of time for delivering that power back at peak discharge is only a few hours. Leaves some development still to do for power in the morning after the night, or even for a cloudy day. Solar thermal has run into similar reliability problems as solar photovoltaic.
• nosuchthing 11y ago
  Least we forget: Tidal energy & Geothermal energy...
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    Tidal offers little potential at tremendous cost and impacts. Outside a very small number of modest sites, it's not likely to see much application. Wave power is even worse. Geothermal from high-flux sites does work and works well, though its limited to a relatively small number of regions worldwide. Many of those have already developed much of the available potential. Iceland, Indinesia, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States most notably. Kenya's Rift Valley is probably the biggest greenfield opportunity with significant impact opportunity (Kenya's existing electrical infrastructure is minuscule). In the US, resources generally exclude both the Yellowstone Caldera and Cascade range.
• sandGorgon 11y ago
  P.S. I'm not an expert, but this has been in news media in India for a long time. The reason that China and India are the only countries going after fission is because of a singular element - Thorium. Both India and China have huge reserves of thorium that can be unlocked with molten salt reactors that are unviable anywhere else in the world (including the US, which gave up on this a long time ago[1]). Australia does have large reserves of thorium, but its projected energy needs are dwarfed by India and China's. China is way ahead than India on this front with more than a billion dollars managed by Jiang Mianheng to conduct research into these new reactors. And which is why India is bending over backwards to sign the India-US Civil Nuclear Energy treaty. Interestingly, a US company, Thorcon [2], has built a "hackable" MSR - though I dont know if it is any good. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor/ http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-... [2] http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-go-into-production-by-2020/ http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-g...
• Mz 11y ago
  There is actually a lot we could do in terms of promoting passive solar -- i.e. a lifestyle and design-based approach that uses less energy to get the same results. In a finite world, I really wish passive solar got a lot more attention than it does. There are serious costs involved in burning ever more energy. Passive solar brilliantly sidesteps that inconvenient physics-based fact.
  • secstate 11y ago
    While I totally agree with you on principal, that's the energy argument equivalent of saying that if there's a coal power plant being built in your backyard you should move rather than complain about it. There is a huge infrastructure cost involved in upgrading, building new or knocking down and rebuilding non-passive solar structures. Now, giving tax breaks to new construction that is passive would be great, but it wont put a dent in the energy consumption issue. I say I agree with you, because I think that saying "cheap energy is the future" would have been 100% as valid a statement in 1965 as it is in 2015. Fifty years and a HUGE series of energy improvements later and we're still chasing the cheap energy dream. Guess what? Oil is cheap. And relative to cutting down wood to heat your house with a fireplace (a la most of human history) current solar is absurdly cheap. What we need, and Musk knows this better than anyone, is better batteries to store energy when we're not using it more efficiently. Batteries will revolutionize the world, and Sam would do well to pay attention to what Musk is doing.
• jjtheblunt 11y ago
  The article ignores the elephant in the room: the problems he discusses are all more directly a result of too many humans for the closed system planet. Period.
• soulsurfer 11y ago
  One important thing that nobody thinks about when discussing nuclear fission/fusion as energy source of the future, is that it is not climate neutral at all. Popular science tends to forget about that. In fact, nearly all of the energy budget on earth comes from the sun. There is natural fission and energy emission on earth, but you can see that as a background constant and the climate system on earth has adapted to it. Fossil energies are just a very large chemical sink for the energy of the sun, and we just burnt it away at once in geological scales. If humanity now starts to deploy nuclear fission or fusion, it will heat the earth even more. Because that energy was basically trapped inside the atomic core, where it didn't play a significant role for the global climate. With more and more atomic energy usage, the energy will finally end as heat somewhere and increase global temperatures even more (not in the way that fossil energies do with emitted greenhouse gases, but still).
  • DennisP 11y ago
    Yes, there will be waste heat and that will add to the Earth's energy budget. But that's a tiny fraction of the heat trapped by excess greenhouse gases. Deploying a bunch of black solar panels will also increase the Earth's energy budget, by absorbing more sunlight. But that's another insignificant effect.
• dmritard96 11y ago
  Obnoxiously self important attitude.
• 3pt14159 11y ago
  Probably not. Energy isn't really what is holding the poor back - a lack of stability and security are. If I had to chose one technological improvement to help most people on the planet it would probably be benevolent AI, which could refocus many of our challenges to what is important. Getting people out of poverty and war. Energy is a tiny component of modern civilization.
  • saryant 11y ago
    Energy is the sole basis of modern civilization. We are Hydrocarbon Man.
    • dredmorbius 11y ago
      Por que no los dos? Yes, abundant energy is behind virtually all past development. What seems to be holding back the next 5 billion, however, is access to what that energy has made available. Though the question of just how many billions can be provided for ought also be raised.
    • 3pt14159 11y ago
      Energy isn't why there are poor people though. The poor have plenty of energy in the form of sun and coal and wind. $50 worth of energy can get you from New York to Toronto. Energy isn't the problem. The problem is security and education.
• sremani 11y ago
  I am convinced LFTRs are the way to go, they fit in with distributed generation model very well. For what it is worth 21st if it takes Nuclear turn will be clearly fission, actually fission is good enough. But if we were to ascend into space and beyond fusion gives us bigger wings.
• hypertexthero 11y ago
  Recently watched Cosmos Episode 6 where Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks of photosynthesis and how all our energy problems would be solved if we were able to learn the 'trade secrets' of how plants do it. This makes a lot of sense. Can anyone point out current research on this field? I don't seem to hear much about it. Edit: Just found this after searching #photosynthesis in Twitter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-photosynthesis-environment-energy_n_7088830.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-photosyn...
  • zbravo 11y ago
    http://solarfuelshub.org/ http://solarfuelshub.org/
  • shanev 11y ago
    Janine Benyus talks about this in her TED talk Biomimicry in action: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action. We should look to nature before designing things since it may have already solved the problem for us. Future technology should also be designed to gracefully degrade like nature, otherwise we're just replacing one problem with another.
  • jddw 11y ago
    There are neat ways to make sunlight into fuel, but it's about what form that energy takes. If it is a fuel that needs to be burned - in the case of sugars from photosynthesis - we already do this by burning wood. I think Cosmos missed a really important lesson which is that the fuels at our disposal are all a function of time and distance. The longer a fuel source has been building, and the less distance it has to travel to be useful to us, the more valuable it may be. The sun is a result of billions of years of the shape-shifting games between mass and energy, all driven by gravity. The fusion energy produced in the sun then has to travel 93 million miles to us to be useful. The food chain harnesses this energy and accumulates it over time, and after hundreds of millions of years much of that energy has been sequestered into fossil fuels. While there is a tremendous amount of power emanating from the sun, it has to go a long way or accumulate for a long time to be useful to us. Nuclear fuel sources on the other hand bring the billions of years of nucleus building that previous generations of stars did for us to our door step. The parent stars of our sun produced heavy actinides like uranium or thorium, as well as the abundant light elements like deuterium, helium, and boron, and then scattering them across the cosmos along with leftover hydrogen in brilliant novae and supernovae. In our case, many of these elements were in the stardust that formed earth, and are here beneath our feet and above our heads. Solar, wind, and nuclear will dominate the 22nd century, but we need both, and they do and can play well together. They just need to be treated and respected equally.
• abalone 11y ago
  > terrestrial-based atomic energy... has major advantages when it comes to cost Are we talking public cost? Because that's all that matters. So far the public cost of nuclear power has been extraordinary, due to accidents and waste. I understand that some of these startups aim to process existing waste in relatively small distributed reactors but what is the public cost of spreading a bunch of "mini" toxic waste sites around the world that remain hazardous for 100 years, instead of centrally storing it? Plus I've read that although these mini reactors are not directly producing material that could be used in a dirty bomb, that they could be converted to do so if they fell into the wrong hands. I may be oversimplifying here, but the question again is what is the public risk of distributing atomic fuels and reactors in a manner that makes them much less secure? Would this make them more susceptible to "war hacking" and could this be the mini-reactor equivalent of a nuclear disaster? Nuclear costs have always been about the long term public costs, not the short term $/kWh. This is before we even consider the taxpayer cost that's gone into nuclear tech development. I wonder if there will be more public money needed to take this tech to market, even if the test reactors bear fruit.
  • mooreds 11y ago
    Anyone thinking about this needs to watch "Into Eternity", a movie about the Finnish nuclear waste repository: http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/ http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/ "In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock - a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous." It was eye opening.
    • ageofwant 11y ago
      That's just nonsense. Forth generation breeder reactors burn their own waste to something close to irrelevant. Existing "Waste" should be continually burned and the energy used to sequester C02 from the atmosphere, for example, not uselessly stored in a bunker. There is no reason for that facility to exist.
      • nl 11y ago
• sunstone 11y ago
  Apparently the crust of the earth is floating on huge nuclear energy generator. I guess it's a materials problem to tap into that?
• kolbe 11y ago
  > By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project. What in the world is this tiny startup doing with a $5mm grant that is so easy and cheap that could possibly lead to that kind of breakthrough in fusion energy?
  • if_by_whisky 11y ago
    Probably nothing? But since they're funded anyway, it's pretty cheap to cross our fingers.
  • ekianjo 11y ago
    > at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project. How is that a measure of doing something meaningful ? Take EADS making the Ariane rocket launchers, they have been spending billions and billions of Euros making rockets for years, yet they have no project like SpaceX and yet they will be rapidly obsolete once SpaceX works as expected. It's not about the amount you spend, it's about experimenting in new areas not explored yet. Now, about fusion, I have no idea what they plan to do, but in principle there's always new things worth trying (even if they end up failing).
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It's a measure that there's been a lot of effort going on in the past decades, so it's unlikely that a random startup with minuscule budget will suddenly crack it. SpaceX vs. Airbus Group is a bad example because Elon is only dropping costs of what is a proven technology (rockets). We don't have a break-even fusion reactor yet. But to be honest, I think we need to encourage more effort, so I applaud the project anyway, and keep my fingers crossed.
      • ekianjo 11y ago
        > SpaceX vs. Airbus Group is a bad example because Elon is only dropping costs of what is a proven technology (rockets). I disagree on that point. SpaceX is not just making rockets cheaper, it's changing the paradigm by making rockets re-usable, which is very far from what EADS is planning to do currently. It's a game-changer and will divide the costs of launching something to space by 10 or more. I cant comment on the Fusion startup, but we should not assume that companies operating with billions of cash are more effective at innovation than smaller ones with smaller budgets. They aren't, and that has been proven in many cases, SpaceX is just one good example coming to mind. In the pharma world, very small biotechs with minimal funding are responsible for the discovery of many new drug targets, and not the large pharma groups themselves.
• FiatLuxDave 11y ago
  Former fusion startup founder here (Fiat Lux Research, funded by DFJ 1995-2000). I couldn't agree more with Sam about the importance of energy for our civilization. Kudos to him for putting his efforts towards important stuff. I have mixed, but mostly positive feelings about venture capital and energy startups. The fact is, it's a tough space. Large capital requirements, prototyping cycles often measured in years, and a low success rate. Everyone is still waiting for the energy unicorn to put Google, Uber, Yahoo, et al. to shame. And energy startups don't benefit from many of the things in SV that infotech startups do, such as ecosystem synergies and being co-located with all the new cool stuff in your industry. This is especially true with regards to one of SV's great strengths, the freedom to fail. Where SV shines is in the short times from idea to testing. In most of the nuclear energy industry, going from idea to tested prototype can take decades. I think we all know the importance of short debugging and feedback cycles. Hirsch harped on this a few years back, and it's still a good point. Look at ITER, which were were talking about back in 1995. ITERative, it is not. Some observations: 1) The teams and funding are a bit larger than they used to be. This is probably a good thing. The design turnaround time is a bit better, but not by much though. It's necessary to tweak a design once you have built it to learn from it and see what its ultimate performance can be. But it's all-too-easy to spend a year or two doing that. Do that a few times and then you're out (of money, time, your mind, what-have-you). 2) Location. There is no advantage to locating an energy company in SV except for proximity to funding (and Stanford, I suppose). We located by the NHMFL in Tallahassee. It's cheaper, and the magnet guys would moonlight for us. However, working with Tim over 3 time-zones had its challenges. I don't think we got the benefit of having a great VC as much as some of his other portfolio companies did (no complaints about him, just the distance). Some things are just hard to explain over the phone. But SV still isn't the right place. I think that there is a big opportunity for VCs to improve how they provide the value-added stuff that they do (beyond providing money) remotely, and energy is the space that needs it most. I don't know the VC job well enough to provide good suggestions, I just know there is an unmet need here. 3) Because the failure rate for startups is so high, it's important to have a decent failure path for the people involved. For software devs, SV jobs often provide a soft landing. Energy guys don't have that easily transferable skill set. So, fusion largely consists of old hands who are willing to spend 20 years ramming a single design through, and a bunch of young redshirts who are sure that they can beat the odds. When every design failure becomes a career failure, people aren't incentived to radically iterate designs quickly. Luckily for me, I learned radiation measurement and protection on-the-job (hey we have neutrons! How many neutrons? Woo hoo! Wait, oh shit!) so that skill transfered over into medical physics quite readily. But imagine what SV would look like if almost every software startup founder who failed once had left the software industry. I wish good luck to Helion, UPower, and all the other teams fighting the good fight.
• deleted 11y ago
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• TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > The big government projects, like NIF and ITER, unfortunately have the feel of peacetime big government projects. Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy amount of productivity and progress.
  • gordjw 11y ago
    A focus on excessive procedure at the expense of real progress, unless there's a pressing need (like war), would be my guess too.
• legulere 11y ago
  One problem I see with nuclear power is that it goes the very inefficient way over heat. The prices in the building industry are rising so much that it already is unprofitable to build nuclear power in the west today. (When Hinkley Point C will start producing energy it will have a higher feed in tariff than photovoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station#Economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...) I don't see any future for nuclear if it doesn't fundamentally change the way it harvests the energy and when it solves the nuclear waste problem economically
  • DennisP 11y ago
    Then you'll like Helion, which produces high-energy charged particles and doesn't use a thermal cycle. Neither of the ycombinator companies produces long-term waste.
• codeshaman 11y ago
  > A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem. It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century (coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating philosophical and ethical standards of humanity during the energy boom. Cheap energy + wrong philosophy = bad application of energy = problems enumerated above. So if you want to tackle any of those problems, you have to work on both variables in that equation, just increasing the availability of energy without raising awareness of how to apply it, will lead to unsatisfactory results in the long term.
  • sebastianconcpt 11y ago
    Indeed. Technology is a multiplier. If we as humans keep repeating some errors we'll shoot our foot (with bigger guns)
• stillsut 11y ago
  The killer app for these modular reactors is to scale with the same footprint: If you have the infrastructure to house one of these boxcars, for the town's first factory, why not 10 boxcars on the same site once the town grows in population. That's what you can't do with solar - with solar you already have a big footprint to power that first factory, and your footprint increases proportional to power use. 21 century calls for scaling roughly 20x = 2x (population growth) * 10x (rise in developing worlds livining standards). I don't want 20x solar footprint.
• dharma1 11y ago
  There already is a very well working fusion reactor - the sun - and it's free. We just need better battery tech.
• MrBunny 11y ago
  Why are we so focused on having only one solution for energy? I would understand the cost would decrease when you put all your eggs in one basket but can we really find one type of energy source that has no disadvantages? Wouldn't we be better served with diversity of energy production (more than we have now)?
• natch 11y ago
  I'm sorry I missed this earlier because I wish Sam could see this comment. Nuclear energy is inherently centralized and difficult to decentralize. This creates all sorts of political and economic dynamics, some of which you (Sam, and YC) may benefit from, but some of which may be damaging to societies in various ways (think corruption, control, monopolies, etc.) Obviously this isn't necessarily true for all possible as-yet-unimagined implementations of nuclear technology. But it's something to think about when comparing energy technologies. Solar, on the other hand, while not necessarily inherently decentralized, is extremely decentralizable, leading to very different dynamics. I'm not saying Nuclear is bad. I'm just saying this stuff should be factored in.
• Helius 11y ago
  " It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement." Oh, Come on! With similar government subsidies and Mandates, Donkey wheels could deliver a similar power density. With such subsidies and mandates, donkey wheels would double, double and redouble again, and one could therefore project donkey wheels to exceed all power generation. Ironically enough, a donkey is 1/3 horsepower, which is 748 watts of power. A donkey at about 250 watts is therefore is roughly equivalent to a solar panel the same size. The donkey has the advantage over solar, in that it's dispatchable, while solar is not. I wish we considered donkeys instead of Solar as a replacement for fossil fules, since the shortcomings might be more obvious to the innumerate.